You can configure the Stateful Interchassis Redundancy feature to determine the active device from a group of devices, based on a number of failover conditions. When a failover occurs, the standby device seamlessly takes over, starts performing traffic forwarding services, and maintains a dynamic routing table.

You can configure pairs of devices to act as hot standbys for each other. Redundancy is configured on an interface basis. Pairs of redundant interfaces are known as redundancy groups (RGs). Redundancy occurs at an application level and does not require a complete physical failure of the interface or device for a switchover of the application to occur. When a switchover occurs, the application activity continues to run seamlessly on the redundant interface.

The figure below depicts an active/standby load-sharing scenario. The figure shows how an RG is configured for a pair of devices that has one outgoing interface. Group A on Router 1 is the active RG and Group A on Router 2 is the standby RG.

Redundant devices are joined by a configurable control link and a data synchronization link. The control link is used to communicate the status of devices. The data synchronization link is used to transfer stateful information from Network Address Translation (NAT) and the firewall and synchronize the stateful database. The pairs of redundant interfaces are configured with the same unique ID number known as the redundant interface identifier (RII).

The status of redundancy group members is determined through the use of hello messages sent over the control link. The software considers either device not responding to a hello message within a configurable amount of time to be a failure and initiates a switchover. For the software to detect a failure in milliseconds, control links run the failover protocol that is integrated with the Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) protocol. You can configure the following parameters for hello messages:

• Hello time—Interval at which hello messages are sent.
• Hold time—Amount of time before which the active or standby device is declared to be down.

The hello time defaults to 3 seconds to align with the Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP), and the hold time defaults to 10 seconds. You can also configure these timers in milliseconds by using the timers hellotime msec command.

To determine the pairs of interfaces that are affected by the switchover, you must configure a unique ID for each pair of redundant interfaces. This ID is known as the RII that is associated with the interface.

A switchover to the standby device can occur when the priority setting that is configured on each device changes. The device with the highest priority value acts as the active device. If a fault occurs on either the active or standby device, the priority of the device is decremented by a configurable amount known as the weight. If the priority of the active device falls below the priority of the standby device, a switchover occurs and the standby device becomes the active device. This default behavior can be overridden by disabling the preemption attribute for the RG. You can also configure each interface to decrease the priority when the Layer 1 state of the interface goes down. The priority that is configured overrides the default priority of an RG.

Each failure event that causes a modification of an RG priority generates a syslog entry that contains a time stamp, the RG that was affected, the previous priority, the new priority, and a description of the failure event cause.

A switchover also can occur when the priority of a device or interface falls below a configurable threshold level.

A switchover to the standby device occurs under the following circumstances:

• Power loss or a reload occurs on the active device (including reloads).
• The run-time priority of the active device goes below that of the standby device (with preempt configured).
• The run-time priority of the active device goes below that of the configured threshold.
• The redundancy group on the active device is reloaded manually. Use the redundancy application reload group rg-number command for a manual reload.